INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERNET VERSION OF THE ASIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE MEASURE (AIM Squared)1
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One of 1995's best-selling books was Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ2.
Goleman convinced his readers that successful people are not necessarily gifted with IQ. What they have is EQ, or emotional intelligence,
which is the ability to recognize and regulate emotions in themselves and in others. But it was not until he wrote What Makes a Leader3
for the Harvard Business Review in 1998 that management leaders really took notice of emotional intelligence as a driver of superior performance in the workplace. 4

The Asian Institute of Management (www.aim.edu.ph), or AIM, constantly seeks innovative approaches in pursuing its teaching mission of developing competent, socially-responsible managers for Asia. Founded in 1968 in Makati City, Philippines, AIM has graduated a network of more than 30,000 international alumni from its MBA, EMBA, Master in Management, Master in Development Management, Master in Entrepreneurship, and executive education programs. It has won accreditation from the AACSB, and the European body-Equis.

In 1998, Prof. Gabino Mendoza, who then held the Weatherhead professorial chair at AIM, visited the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. There he met Dr. Richard Boyatzis, a pioneer in the development of emotional intelligence among MBA students and practicing executives. When Prof. Mendoza returned to AIM, he told the faculty of the MBA program that they were "not teaching management unless (they) started teaching students about emotional intelligence." The faculty of the Human Behavior in Organizations course took up his challenge. After learning what they could about emotional intelligence, they realized that it was a "missing link" in many of the classic management models, giving them fresh insights for their courses on Leadership, Group Dynamics, Communication, and Organizational Behavior.

Coincidentally, Prof. Eduardo Morato had been developing the concept and pedagogy of Self-mastery in his research on entrepreneurs. When he became Dean in 2001, he expanded this concept into a philosophy of student-centered learning, which AIM adopted. He fully supported the need for AIM to know more about emotional intelligence in the Asian setting, and agreed that AIM should have its own, Asian-based, emotional intelligence test.

Such an instrument would provide "before and after" metrics to validate the emotional intelligence pedagogies that AIM's faculty members were developing. It would also be a research tool whose predictive validity, once proven, would aid in organization development interventions. Over time, its continuing usage would strengthen its reliability and validity, and expand its normative capability.

The initiative would also support AIM's interest in the whole-brain learning approach and its commitment to humanizing the process of management education. Developing emotional intelligence in its students and executive adult-learners would complement the already excellent technical and cognitive features of AIM's teaching programs. The Asian derivatives of the AIM instrument would give it a distinctive edge over other emotional intelligence tests which derive from Western concepts and context.

1 Some parts of this introduction are adapted from an unpublished research report, "Construction of a reliable and valid Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EiQ) test as a diagnostic-developmental-research tool," prepared by the Center for Organization Research and Development, Department of Psychology, Ateneo de Manila University, 2003; and "A guide to using the Asian Institute of Management Emotional Intelligence Measure" (unpublished, 2003).
2 New York: Bantam Books, 1995.
3 Boston: Harvard Business Review, 1998.
4 The story goes that the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, was so convinced by the article that he had a worldwide study conducted for his organization. The results are reported by Cavallo, Kathleeen and Dottie Brienze (Emotional competence and leadership excellence at Johnson & Johnson: the emotional intelligence and leadership study) and can be viewed in http://www.eiconsortium.org. The study concludes that "the highest performing managers have significantly more 'emotional competence' than other managers."